Szabolcs Veres at Spencer Brownstone

Remember back when I wrote about the abundance of up-and-coming Romanian painters? In an addendum to the post, I mentioned Szabolcs Veres, another painter from Romania whose work appeals to my twisted sense of beauty and whose name baffles my sense of pronunciation. Anyway, last night, I clicked the wrong bookmark in the browser menu and was taken to Veres's page at the Spencer Brownstone Gallery website. Out of curiosity, I checked the site to see what the current show was - it was Szabolcs Veres, and it was coming down in two days. Needless to say, the following afternoon I was off to SoHo to check it out.

The SoHo gallery scene is pretty much dead now. The vast majority of SoHo galleries are photography galleries, which can be interesting, but when I take an afternoon to visit galleries I prefer to have some variety. Deitch Projects is there, along with the Drawing Center, but most of the other big names have moved to Chelsea by now. Spencer Brownstone is another SoHoldout - it's a decent gallery that shows a variety of (mostly) European artists. The show at Spencer Brownstone is Veres's first American solo show, and his first show in the US in general.

So after waiting fifteen minutes for the subway for no good reason, I finally made it to SoHo and to the gallery. My first impression of the show was: "these paintings look much bigger in person." I had only previously seen Veres's work on the web, and the sense of scale was totally lost in digitization. Because most of his work is portraiture, I expected the paintings to be life-size, kind of like Francis Bacon's triptychs. These paintings were far larger than I had expected - each was about a meter-and-a-half tall.

One thing that seems to be a hallmark of contemporary Romanian painting (or, at least, Ghenie and Veres) is the bold use of contrast. Ghenie's high contrast darks give his paintings the look of colored black-and-white film stills (which is where much of his imagery originates). In Veres's work, shadows are integrated into the forms, intertwined with flesh and matter. This is most prominent in the deeply set eyes in his portraits.

Based on his loose brushwork and seemingly manic paint application, some would argue that Veres is an expressionistic painter. However, I would argue differently - I see his work as using the language of expressionism as a means to reach unrelated ends. To me, Veres's paintings, particularly the large-scale portraits, are finely balanced on the thin line between beauty and horror. The paintings are very beautiful and have a strange allure to them, but the deformity caused by the artist's hand removes them from the realm of "traditional" beauty. I see his use of abstraction as a tool to maintain the balance between beauty and horror, not as the result of any metaphysical "self-expression." Beauty is subjective, of course, but I find the greatest beauty in imperfection - I'd rather look at an image of someone unique rather than at Playboy's flavor-of-the-month models.

One more thing to add - after seeing the show I took a look at the gallery's price list and I was dumbfounded - they're practically giving these paintings away! Most of them are under $6000, and a few are about twice that, but nowhere near the prices I had expected - my estimate was around 15k for the "smaller" pieces, and a bit more for the larger ones. I could have taken one of them home with me, but I just paid off my credit card and I don't want to put it near the maximum again. Also, the paintings look best from about fifteen feet away, and I don't think there's a spot in my apartment where you can get that far back without stepping into the hallway. Still, I can imagine seeing another show of his work in a few years and beating myself up because his work is going for ten times what it is now.